(I cannot find who owns the rights to this photo, but I had to use it.)

I’ve always kind of had an odd thing with Rachel Maddow. Not love hate, I just can’t decide how I feel about out her. She’s very smart, but she also has a book to sell. She’s a “liberal pundit” so, sadly, no one who really needs to hear her warning words will listen. I’m more a Woody Guthrie guy. Maybe that’s just a function of age.

Rachel has her flag planted firmly in the camp on the left-hand side, and while I often lean that way myself I think this message, her message, would be better received from someone closer to the hearts of those who seem to allow the coming storm, like Nikki Haley. I’m finding myself suddenly listening to Nikki a lot these days, but I choke on her GOP Credentials, but at the same time a part of me believes we need to hear from legitimate voices from both the centrist Democrats and the moderate Republicans, then I remember I don’t trust any of them. I believe to the helixes of my DNA politicians are flat out, no damn good. Rachel isn’t a politician, at least not yet, so that is a plus for me.

If I could trust Ms. Haley on her word, I could see myself voting for her. But I don’t trust anyone running for any office on their word anymore.

I do believe the situation is dour. Rachel’s words about reaching out to friends and neighbors and estranged family didn’t paint a picture for me of ‘rise up and stand up,’ but more gathering your loved ones as the tsunami approaches, knowing we will surely all die in the wake.

I hate this. I’m old enough to have known the guys who went to fight the fascists. They went to war because they knew there wasn’t any other choice. I had an uncle who had a big American flag tattooed all across his chest. In later life, when he needed open heart surgery, he refused because it would require cutting into the flag, no lie! I’ve known and lived with guys who had a deep grasp of freedom and democracy—at least as it was sold to them. I often wonder and wish these guys were here today. I can promise you none of them would take this talk of authoritarianism lightly.

I fear if Ms Maddows’ words come to fruition, we will find ourselves soon at war. This time it may be civil war. This time we won’t have those dust bowl, depression era farm boys, with balls of steel fighting for home and hearth and mom and apple pie on our side. This time, if it happens, I fear will be an army of the easily led and mislead and a very, very different outcome.

I’ve struggled all my life with my almost genetic love of Fords. From the ‘32 Deuce, to the Shoebox ‘49–‘51 my dad loved, to standing on a sidewalk in Branchville NJ on a sunny day in April 1964 and drooling over my Uncle Harry’s ‘64 1/2 Mustang. A gorgeous deep blue, white interior convertible, four on the floor and a 289 V8 under the hood, to my own Mustang today, a twenty something year old car that I love in ways that make me question my grasp on reality. In the back of my mind, I always hear the nagging reality that Henry Ford was a fascist and an antisemite. In many ways, his Ford is no better than a Hitlermobile, but I somehow find a way to rationalize all this.

Lindbergh was a fascist and a Nazi sympathizer and an antisemite, something else we seemed to miss in school. Someway, somehow, we didn’t learn these things, or if we did, we somehow allowed it, as we cheered Lucky Lindy soaring over the Atlantic… just like we somehow allow this deadly rhetoric today.

There is nothing new or unique to our time about fascists or their beliefs.

I can’t get past the fact that Woody wrote a song about his landlord, Fred Trump. That’s a level of irony that I can’t even begin to explain.

To wrap up this mess, I think we are lucky to have people like Rachel speaking out. We need a lot more people focused on the very real and present danger of fascism. I hope her podcast and TV discussions spawn a very real and urgently needed discussion on this subject, with more Republican voices speaking up and speaking out. We need to have these discussions and we are running out of time to change the hearts and minds of those who could stop this. I know this isn’t a uniquely American issue. A lot of my readers, a majority in fact, live in other nations and they are witnessing the same madness. This spreading disease of populism and autocracy terrifies me.

Last night, I think I finally decided how I feel about Ms. Maddow. We need many, many more like her to initiate and to join in this discussion. This isn’t about conservativism vs liberalism. I’ve spent my entire life bitching about the American system and the government. I fear in the very near future I’ll learn as bad as it is and has been, something much, much worse is looming on the horizon.

We’ve got less than a year to decide if we want to live under a system of freedom, however flawed and unequal and twisted that freedom may be, or something much uglier and darker and deadly.

I’m spending some time today thinking about Woody and Ol’ Tom Joad. Like Ms. Maddow said last night, this threat doesn’t come for every generation, but it is here now for our generation to deal with. I hope we are as smart and strong as those farmers of the greatest generation…